What do you think?
Rate this book
A History of Modern Britain in Twenty Murders
In this groundbreaking new book from the UK's leading criminologist, David Wilson explores what our nation's most lethal murderers reveal about us in a thrilling blend of history and true crime.
Professor David Wilson is renowned for deciphering the hidden motives of murderers and the context in which crimes took place. In A History of Modern Britain in 20 Murders, he zooms out to look at the big picture, examining what multiple murders across a range of eras can tell us about our past...and our present.
Told in Wilson's absorbing style, this is a fresh look at crimes and points in history we think we know. Ranging from the crimes of Jack the Ripper and the shocking "Brides in the Bath" deaths, to the tragic murders of James Bulger and Sarah Everard, Wilson reveals why some cases particularly resonate with and reverberate through public consciousness, and how they can help us understand Britain's complex, diverse and ongoing history.
From colonial wars and the end of the empire, to the Blitz, through the swinging sixties, into the nineties all the way to present day, this is a truly fascinating and accessible approach to both history and criminology, always centring the victims, that will leave readers questioning the wider impact of the next murder case that grips Britain.
Professor David Wilson is renowned for deciphering the hidden motives of murderers and the context in which crimes took place. In A History of Modern Britain in 20 Murders, he zooms out to look at the big picture, examining what multiple murders across a range of eras can tell us about our past...and our present.
Told in Wilson's absorbing style, this is a fresh look at crimes and points in history we think we know. Ranging from the crimes of Jack the Ripper and the shocking "Brides in the Bath" deaths, to the tragic murders of James Bulger and Sarah Everard, Wilson reveals why some cases particularly resonate with and reverberate through public consciousness, and how they can help us understand Britain's complex, diverse and ongoing history.
From colonial wars and the end of the empire, to the Blitz, through the swinging sixties, into the nineties all the way to present day, this is a truly fascinating and accessible approach to both history and criminology, always centring the victims, that will leave readers questioning the wider impact of the next murder case that grips Britain.
432 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 18, 2025
21 people are currently reading
119 people want to read
About the author
David Wilson
25 books130 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
David Wilson is Professor of Criminology and founding Director of the Centre for Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University – one of the university’s “research centres of excellence”. He is the co-Editor of the prestigious Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, which is produced five times per year. Prior to taking up his academic appointment in September 1997, David was Senior Policy Advisor to the Prison Reform Trust, and between October 1983-April 1997 he worked as a Prison Governor.
David completed his PhD at Selwyn College Cambridge in 1983, and immediately joined HM Prison Service as Assistant Governor at HMP Wormwood Scrubs. He worked as a Prison Governor at a variety of establishments, including HMYOIs Huntercombe and Finnamore Wood – where at the age of 29 he was the youngest governing Governor in the country – and at HMPs Grendon and Woodhill. At HMP Grendon he ran the sex offender treatment programme, and at HMP Woodhill he designed and managed the two specialist units for the 12 most disruptive prisoners in the penal system. This experience brought him into contact with some of the most notorious criminals in the country.
David has advised on live police investigations related to a linked series of murders and has provided training to new Senior Investigating Officers who will take charge of murder inquiries.
His current research interests range from the phenomenon of British serial murder, family annihilation, hitmen and lethal violence within organised crime, to all aspects of prison history and penal reform.
His first work of fiction is The Rules of Restraint.
David Wilson is Professor of Criminology and founding Director of the Centre for Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University – one of the university’s “research centres of excellence”. He is the co-Editor of the prestigious Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, which is produced five times per year. Prior to taking up his academic appointment in September 1997, David was Senior Policy Advisor to the Prison Reform Trust, and between October 1983-April 1997 he worked as a Prison Governor.
David completed his PhD at Selwyn College Cambridge in 1983, and immediately joined HM Prison Service as Assistant Governor at HMP Wormwood Scrubs. He worked as a Prison Governor at a variety of establishments, including HMYOIs Huntercombe and Finnamore Wood – where at the age of 29 he was the youngest governing Governor in the country – and at HMPs Grendon and Woodhill. At HMP Grendon he ran the sex offender treatment programme, and at HMP Woodhill he designed and managed the two specialist units for the 12 most disruptive prisoners in the penal system. This experience brought him into contact with some of the most notorious criminals in the country.
David has advised on live police investigations related to a linked series of murders and has provided training to new Senior Investigating Officers who will take charge of murder inquiries.
His current research interests range from the phenomenon of British serial murder, family annihilation, hitmen and lethal violence within organised crime, to all aspects of prison history and penal reform.
His first work of fiction is The Rules of Restraint.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 9, 2025
You could say that this book’s heart is in the right place. But its arms and legs and some of its brains are in the wrong place. The idea is good – let’s see how twenty murder cases throw light on Britain’s ever-changing culture, starting in 1885 with the horrible crimes of Jack the Ripper and ending up in 2025 with the horrible crimes of Wayne Couzens, who was a London police officer who used his status for kidnap, rape and murder.
This book covers so much ground: Ripperology (it was Aaron Kosminski, probably), the Boer War, the six types of murderers who use social media, the Jarrow March, Scottish housing policy, the London blitz, the Notting Hill riots, gay life in London in the 60s, British declinism, all the way to the Black Lives Matter movement and the current crisis in policing in general. And lots more. The cases selected by David Wilson are good ones, meaning that they are very worthy of investigation and discussion. With all this going for it, why did this book aggravate me so much?
THE MYTH OF DNA
Mostly it was the plodding plain painfully pedantic repetitive and often excruciatingly banal prose itself. He is way too self-consciously trying to avoid being misunderstood or being in any way offensive:
This questioning [of the police] has often focused on the activities of the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), usually known as simply the Met. This isn’t to imply that there have been no scandals connected to the activities of police officers working elsewhere in England and Wales, or for Police Scotland, which is controlled by the devolved Scottish parliament.
Sometimes it’s hard to figure out the point he is trying to make. He discusses the role of DNA in police work. He says that the UK national DNA database was set up in 1995 “and is now one of the largest and oldest DNA databases in the world, holding more than 7 million profiles”. He says that all this is “usually viewed as an uncomplicated success story in the fight against crime, but is that fair or just another myth?”
because
A 2019 analysis …produced some startling results. For all crimes recorded in England and Wales in 2015-6 DNA was linked to outcome in only 0.3 percent of cases, and this low rate had remained unchanged since the database was created
And even for homicide cases DNA evidence only figured in 8% of cases. So – what – we all have an exaggerated idea of the usefulness of DNA evidence and this is very bad? The database ought to be scaled back?
The myth of DNA’s vital importance in the fight against crime remains persistent, and is reinforced by TV programmes, films and books. It’s a myth that therefore must perform some cultural function, although what that might be is far from clear.
POINTLESS
Sometimes the point he is making is really not worth making, such as in Chapter Five, which is about crime committed during the blackouts enforced in London when the Blitz was happening (September 1940 to May 1941 – six air raids per week, at least 10,000 civilian deaths). He defines “myth” as “a symbolic narrative that might only sketchily relate to real events”. The myth of the Blitz was that plucky Londoners were all in it together, from the Queen Mother to the lowliest costermonger, and everyone was brave and kept up their spirits and sang music hall songs as the bombs rained down. He explodes this myth by recounting the awful exploits of the Blackout Ripper (Gordon Cummins, an RAF pilot, who killed four women during this period, in London). So everyone was not plucky, upstanding, defying everything Hitler could throw at us, etc etc.
Well, no. Not everyone was. There was even a gang who would rush into collapsed buildings to try to find bodies to steal jewellery from – how terrible. But of course this happens. The “myth” never tried to tell us that every Londoner was brave and noble. Of course there were crimes committed. It’s kind of obvious.
MORE MOANING AND GROANING
He lapses into psychobabble at times. He introduces “the concept of the catathymic crisis”
It’s used to explain different forms of violence which are the consequences of a latent and unconscious motivation that results in an “emotional explosion”.
And when discussing the unusual female spree killer Joanne Dennehy he says
The Freudian concept of the “death drive” is a helpful place to start…The death drive is expressed through an individual being aggressive and self-destructive, and having a repetition compulsion. In other words, the psychological phenomenon when someone repeats an event time after time so that they develop a pattern of behaviour as a way of managing difficult and distressing events from earlier in their life.
How enlightening is all this? Not very, I fear.
And he used nasty modern phrases like “responsibilised” and “performing masculinity”.
And he says some frankly weird kind of stuff like :
School can easily be bypassed and increasingly children teach their parents how to navigate online communication and social media interactions, rather than having to read print media. It could be argued that children don’t actually need to learn to read or write at all, and in an age of artificial intelligence mass literacy is a thing of the past.
Does he mean what he seems to be saying here ?
BUT THERE IS A BUT
But he does ask some useful questions, such as (one of my own favourites) why is it some crimes are famous but others, just as terrible, are forgotten? No, he doesn’t have any answers, but it’s always worth asking.
In 1981 Fun Boy Three with Bananarama released a single called “It Ain’t What You Do, It’s The Way That You Do It” and I think that rather cruelly sums up this earnest but exasperating volume.
This book covers so much ground: Ripperology (it was Aaron Kosminski, probably), the Boer War, the six types of murderers who use social media, the Jarrow March, Scottish housing policy, the London blitz, the Notting Hill riots, gay life in London in the 60s, British declinism, all the way to the Black Lives Matter movement and the current crisis in policing in general. And lots more. The cases selected by David Wilson are good ones, meaning that they are very worthy of investigation and discussion. With all this going for it, why did this book aggravate me so much?
THE MYTH OF DNA
Mostly it was the plodding plain painfully pedantic repetitive and often excruciatingly banal prose itself. He is way too self-consciously trying to avoid being misunderstood or being in any way offensive:
This questioning [of the police] has often focused on the activities of the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), usually known as simply the Met. This isn’t to imply that there have been no scandals connected to the activities of police officers working elsewhere in England and Wales, or for Police Scotland, which is controlled by the devolved Scottish parliament.
Sometimes it’s hard to figure out the point he is trying to make. He discusses the role of DNA in police work. He says that the UK national DNA database was set up in 1995 “and is now one of the largest and oldest DNA databases in the world, holding more than 7 million profiles”. He says that all this is “usually viewed as an uncomplicated success story in the fight against crime, but is that fair or just another myth?”
because
A 2019 analysis …produced some startling results. For all crimes recorded in England and Wales in 2015-6 DNA was linked to outcome in only 0.3 percent of cases, and this low rate had remained unchanged since the database was created
And even for homicide cases DNA evidence only figured in 8% of cases. So – what – we all have an exaggerated idea of the usefulness of DNA evidence and this is very bad? The database ought to be scaled back?
The myth of DNA’s vital importance in the fight against crime remains persistent, and is reinforced by TV programmes, films and books. It’s a myth that therefore must perform some cultural function, although what that might be is far from clear.
POINTLESS
Sometimes the point he is making is really not worth making, such as in Chapter Five, which is about crime committed during the blackouts enforced in London when the Blitz was happening (September 1940 to May 1941 – six air raids per week, at least 10,000 civilian deaths). He defines “myth” as “a symbolic narrative that might only sketchily relate to real events”. The myth of the Blitz was that plucky Londoners were all in it together, from the Queen Mother to the lowliest costermonger, and everyone was brave and kept up their spirits and sang music hall songs as the bombs rained down. He explodes this myth by recounting the awful exploits of the Blackout Ripper (Gordon Cummins, an RAF pilot, who killed four women during this period, in London). So everyone was not plucky, upstanding, defying everything Hitler could throw at us, etc etc.
Well, no. Not everyone was. There was even a gang who would rush into collapsed buildings to try to find bodies to steal jewellery from – how terrible. But of course this happens. The “myth” never tried to tell us that every Londoner was brave and noble. Of course there were crimes committed. It’s kind of obvious.
MORE MOANING AND GROANING
He lapses into psychobabble at times. He introduces “the concept of the catathymic crisis”
It’s used to explain different forms of violence which are the consequences of a latent and unconscious motivation that results in an “emotional explosion”.
And when discussing the unusual female spree killer Joanne Dennehy he says
The Freudian concept of the “death drive” is a helpful place to start…The death drive is expressed through an individual being aggressive and self-destructive, and having a repetition compulsion. In other words, the psychological phenomenon when someone repeats an event time after time so that they develop a pattern of behaviour as a way of managing difficult and distressing events from earlier in their life.
How enlightening is all this? Not very, I fear.
And he used nasty modern phrases like “responsibilised” and “performing masculinity”.
And he says some frankly weird kind of stuff like :
School can easily be bypassed and increasingly children teach their parents how to navigate online communication and social media interactions, rather than having to read print media. It could be argued that children don’t actually need to learn to read or write at all, and in an age of artificial intelligence mass literacy is a thing of the past.
Does he mean what he seems to be saying here ?
BUT THERE IS A BUT
But he does ask some useful questions, such as (one of my own favourites) why is it some crimes are famous but others, just as terrible, are forgotten? No, he doesn’t have any answers, but it’s always worth asking.
In 1981 Fun Boy Three with Bananarama released a single called “It Ain’t What You Do, It’s The Way That You Do It” and I think that rather cruelly sums up this earnest but exasperating volume.
September 18, 2025
I bought this book on a whim after seeing a three minute clip of David Wilson speaking. He was so passionate and articulate that I just felt compelled to listen to what he had to say. I am so happy that this book didn't let me down.
For many reasons this a strong crime non fiction and a strong history non fiction. The handling of the victims and crimes themselves in this book is beautifully done. Wilson takes the time to paint a picture of them where he can or where is appropriate. The intersection of culture and history at the time of each murder really allows Wilson to examine how and why these murders might have happened when they did but also the impact they had on Britain as a whole. It is also very aptly published in September of 2025 where many of the topics and issues that are in this book are rearing their head again and so you can reflect on what this might mean for us today. Lastly, I think they idea of the British Myth was well examined in relation to murder.
I am also very interested to read the autobiography of the London Blitz era gangster Billy Hill as his observations about London on the Blitz were incredibly interesting.
For many reasons this a strong crime non fiction and a strong history non fiction. The handling of the victims and crimes themselves in this book is beautifully done. Wilson takes the time to paint a picture of them where he can or where is appropriate. The intersection of culture and history at the time of each murder really allows Wilson to examine how and why these murders might have happened when they did but also the impact they had on Britain as a whole. It is also very aptly published in September of 2025 where many of the topics and issues that are in this book are rearing their head again and so you can reflect on what this might mean for us today. Lastly, I think they idea of the British Myth was well examined in relation to murder.
I am also very interested to read the autobiography of the London Blitz era gangster Billy Hill as his observations about London on the Blitz were incredibly interesting.
January 26, 2026
Very interesting idea to explore whether certain details of the cases can originate from social or historical background. The book includes references to additional sources for those who prefer a textbook-style approach to this way of thinking. Also, the Jack the Ripper case is presented in great detail and includes some aspects that are claimed not to have been available before, which is exciting to read.
Despite that, there are a few things that I found puzzling and ultimately caused me to leave the book altogether - the middle chapters do not seem to have been worked on. The chapters are split into parts - social background that seems to consist of local politics, the details about the case, and the ways the previous parts can be tied together, which sometimes seem to be very loosely. Some conclusions felt like they were not based on anything; however, some of them were grandiose and needed additional support to feel believable. I believe this book could greatly benefit from a collaboration with a historian, who can provide social context to make the claims feel evidence-based.
Despite that, there are a few things that I found puzzling and ultimately caused me to leave the book altogether - the middle chapters do not seem to have been worked on. The chapters are split into parts - social background that seems to consist of local politics, the details about the case, and the ways the previous parts can be tied together, which sometimes seem to be very loosely. Some conclusions felt like they were not based on anything; however, some of them were grandiose and needed additional support to feel believable. I believe this book could greatly benefit from a collaboration with a historian, who can provide social context to make the claims feel evidence-based.
January 21, 2026
This is a really interesting take on historical sources, which is self awaredly English focused. I think in particular one of the big things I noted is that it speaks of WW1/2, and some race / sexuality issues but it completely ignored any of the troubles/IRA practise. this is understandable as it is a history of Britain, really "England" with 1 Scottish case flavour - however given the tone of the book and how focused on cultural and economic change, and the length given to the 30s-70s i was surprised there was little to no mention.
October 4, 2025
An utterly fascinating read into what the crimes of the past can tell us about the last 150 years of British society.
October 17, 2025
3.5 stars
January 10, 2026
a bit tangenital at times, but overall an interesting view of how the UK developed through the centuries, and what these murders demonstrated about the country at the time. the inclusion of lesser known/historical murders I also found valuable, and how they not only reflected societal attitudes at the time, but also how they challenged the idea of "British values". this overall theme of how the state controlled (and continues to control) the narrative of such murders to reinforce this myth, while I think is something that could be explored in more depth, is a conclusion that is hard to disagree with, and is a good starting point for further reading/discussion.
(mild CW for uncensored usage of the N-word in a quote in the chapter about racism [Kelso Cochrane]).
(mild CW for uncensored usage of the N-word in a quote in the chapter about racism [Kelso Cochrane]).
December 30, 2025
The social commentary in this book is excellent and demonstrates just how crime/ murder/ political change and the reduction of the welfare state has influenced modern Britain. A further reflection on the“good old days” that people like to look back on and how much the media and politicians influence beliefs and only seem to present one narrative of our recent history.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews